Leaving Before the Rains Come Read online

  Then guilt heaped on guilt since God was ever-present, omniscient, and all-seeing. “Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth?” In the black-and-white world of school, God was in all the rules about not talking after lights-out, not running the faucet for longer than a count of thirty, not taking more than one square of butter at supper. We were our surname, a number, accountable. “Be good. Our men and boys are out there dying for you,” Mrs. Martingale told us every evening, and their deaths felt immediate, as if they were happening just outside the dormitory windows.

  We, who were told to be good, were not like English or American children who were told to eat their spinach because of the remote specter of starving children in Africa. Unlike the vague benefits of vegetables, being good was a tangible imperative linked directly to the war and to all our dead whose number multiplied seemingly without end. At morning assembly, we were read the words of Cyprian of Carthage: “Let us on both sides of death always pray for one another.” Then we bowed our heads and beseeched God to protect our troops, and to send us peace and plentiful rain, and to grant us an ample harvest. But God remained pretty meager with his miracles: the dead stayed dead, the war went on, the rain either came too early and too strong or not at all, and the harvest depended on whether or not we’d had eelworm and blight.

  At last I concluded that if God existed, he was not my personal savior or a heavenly anything. He was, I thought, on the side of the anciently good and the contemporary mustachioed Bible-thumpers. He was for the people who were willing to get nailed to crosses or strapped to altars or to spend their lives wandering in the desert. I would have done any of these things if I had thought it would return Olivia to us, but I also doubted God would notice my sacrifice. I had a suspicion he was too busy taking care of the genuinely black-and-white people like my Sunday school teacher, not the fake faithless believers like me.

  Then on the night of June 23, 1978, at the Emmanuel Mission School, a place roughly halfway between town and our farm, eight British missionaries and four of their children, ranging in age from six to three weeks old, were killed by liberation forces. I can’t remember now how we came to see the photographs of the massacre at our school, but I have a memory of us students huddled over grainy images that had been published in a booklet by the Rhodesian Ministry of Information. What has remained vivid for me all these years later is a photo of Pamela Grace, the bayoneted newborn lying face up, her mouth open, arm outstretched to her bloody impaled mother.

  Perhaps inevitably, the image of that dead missionary baby became conflated in my mind with the memory of Olivia’s motionless corpse on the bed of our neighbor’s spare room on the afternoon of her drowning. Death might give meaning to life, rendering it precious and fleeting and something not to be wasted, I already understood that, but the death of blameless babies seemed to me worse than senseless. It degraded life and rendered it cheap and pointless. My already shaky belief vaporized, leaving nothing but fear and a terrible sense of aloneness in its place.

  I came to the only possible logical conclusion: God could not exist. Little Pamela, child of two missionaries, did not look as if she had been blasted directly to heaven. Like Olivia, she looked awfully and futilely dead. And if God hadn’t been with those babies in their tiny innocence, or at least gathered them to him bodily at the moment of their demise, then he certainly wasn’t with us, or with our soldiers, or even with the Sunday school teacher. God was nowhere. It was just all we Godless people—regardless of whether we were black-and-white people or colorful people—bashing up against one another on a lonely planet. None of us was going to be saved by anyone but each other.

  My flawed but convincing calculations made mathematical leaps. Since God was nonexistent, the only thing that stood between oblivion and me was love. Unlovable people, I reasoned, were invisibly endangered. Lovable people were memorable. Lacking natural cuteness, I used the gift of volume I had been granted from birth and I became siren loud, deliberately unforgettable. Wanting to ensure a reliable exit from any catastrophe, I was careful to make every entrance count. I stage-managed my way into the center of my parents’ boozy get-togethers by dressing up as a troopie, singing patriotic Rhodesian songs (of which we believed ABBA to be some of the leading writers), performing faux stripteasing acts behind bedsheets over which I flung my mother’s underwear pilfered from her top drawer. I sang about not losing and having no regrets, layering an approximation of the Swedish accents of Anni-Frid and Agnetha over my Rhodesian nasal whine.

  And in the absence of God, I transferred his authority to the next highest, visible, logical power: my father. After all, like God, Dad’s rules were absolute, capricious, and patriarchal. “Don’t argue with your father,” he said, if we ever dared contradict him. Like God, Dad could seem remote and mysterious, by turns withholding and munificent. Like with God, you could talk to Dad without the expectation of reply or favor, and even if nothing happened, or the outcome was unfavorable, you could comfort yourself by arguing that he knew best. And as the man of the house, and, more important, the man with the FN rifle, he held in his gift the seeming power of life and death. I worshipped him.

  MR. ADVENTURE’S IMMUNITY

  I had always thought it would be an impossibly tricky sideways maneuver to slip just far enough out of my father’s haphazard but indisputable jurisdiction and under the influence of some other calmer control without eddying out of my life altogether. But Charlie seemed the perfect escort for such a move. He was capable and unflappable, and most important of all, he seemed naïve enough not to know whom he was truly up against. Or perhaps he was above it all. In either case, I was saved.

  For starters, Charlie didn’t appear enthralled or impressed by my father’s suicide mission of a deliberately disordered life. While Charlie had a degree in international business and liked to discuss global finance and economic theory, Dad seemed so bored by money that he kept only mental accounts. “It’ll come out in the wash,” he said, by which I knew he meant he expected to be paid—just as he expected to pay—what was reasonable. Anything more than that didn’t make sense, in part because having a theory about economics was predicated on a certain belief that the world wasn’t a chaotic and surprising place. “You win some, you lose some,” Dad always said, and didn’t seem to mind on which side of that equation he landed.

  Then the strong-arming to drink more than the sensible amount—a couple of beers, an aperitif, a glass of wine with supper—didn’t impress Charlie at all. “What’s the matter with you?” my father asked. “The Muslims get to you?” To which Charlie only smiled and walked away, his left shoulder cocked in a way that I later recognized as an attitude of irritated self-righteousness. “Bloody teetotalers should be shot at dawn,” Dad muttered. “Anyway, half of them, turn your back for three seconds and they’ve siphoned you dry.”

  “Never trust anyone who doesn’t drink,” my mother said.

  But in our very first evening alone together, Charlie defied my parents’ fears and offered me a kamikaze. “Vodka with lime,” he explained. “And there’s supposed to be Triple Sec, but since this is Zambia, we’ll have to make do with a splash of brandy and some orange peel.” It was as if he was speaking an exotic foreign language. I wanted to shut my eyes and listen to him reeling off the ingredients of cocktails for the rest of the evening. Whisky and water was about as sophisticated as we got at the Mkushi Country Club unless it was Greek night. In that case, we always hoped for ouzo. This we drank weakly diluted with Coke until even my mother could understand the logic of lesbianism and the working-class lyricism of Nikos Kazantzakis. “Bouboulina,” she called me then, to show not only her literary prowess but also to demonstrate that all was forgiven.

  I said, “Sounds wonderful.”

  So Charlie mixed two drinks, scraping the skin of a fresh orange over the top of the oily concoctions, and led me into the garden. It was a bachel
or setup, a couple of wire lawn chairs, a rickety table, a few straggling plants in pots straining against the enthusiastic but uneven watering regime of his employee, Mr. Sinazongwe. Charlie’s Labrador retriever lay at our feet, panting in the heavy way of a large dog in the tropics. It was a good sign, I thought, that Charlie had brought Tank with him from Wyoming. It demonstrated he was committed to staying in Zambia, because whatever else I knew about him, I chose to believe he was someone who would never leave a dog behind. “I’ll call all my Labradors Tank,” Charlie said. “My grandmother always named her Labrador retrievers Sam.”

  “What if she had more than one dog at a time?” I asked, thinking of our pile of animals.

  “She didn’t.”

  “Oh.” I let this demonstration of heroic restraint settle for a moment.

  Charlie raised his glass, “Nostrovia,” he said.

  “Mud in your eye,” I replied.

  Then I swallowed my drink the way my mother does, as if marauding barbarians are bearing down on her to steal it away from her parched lips. But Charlie sipped his thoughtfully, relishing the clink of ice against the glass; ice made from bottled water, I noted, not like the Fullers who drank whatever they could find, lukewarm if need be, and had no compunction about using ice made from unboiled water. “A few germs never hurt anyone,” Dad always said. And if a bout of diarrhea ensued, it simply proved his point. “See? Keeps you from getting all blocked up.”

  The sun went down and darkness happened with the abruptness of a curtain being drawn across the sky, and with it the temperature dropped. Charlie, seemingly immune to the cold, told me about Wyoming, and it seemed a land of fairytale proportions, the way Africa sounded to me when I heard foreigners speak about it. It was winter for seven months a year there, he said, snow piled up to the eaves of his grandmother’s cabin (no wonder she drank). And when summer came, it descended like panic, everything happening at once. He gestured back to the chimneypiece in his house where he kept a sprig of sagebrush to remind him of home, and I understood this gesture like my mother’s, a superstitious prophylactic against homesickness, her touching the four walls of any home to which she wished to return.

  Half an hour passed and the complete blackness of a moonless southern African night covered us. We went inside and Charlie built a fire and we sat watching the flames in silence for a while. I waited expectantly for Charlie to make more kamikazes, but when he was finished with his drink, he took both our glasses into the kitchen and put them in the sink. I was astonished. By every measure, what we had just done could not be considered anything close to kamikaze, the divine wind of destruction. By my book, it barely counted as a feeble dip of the wing at an aircraft carrier. Still, it was a drink with a serious-sounding name and it reinforced my idea that Charlie was a colorful enough man with a reassuringly black-and-white foundation. I breathed.

  Thirteen and a half years after Olivia drowned and thirteen years after the massacre of those missionaries, eleven years after the end of Zimbabwe’s bush war and the death of another of my mother’s infants; after a lifetime of seeing tragedies of the sort that seemed both accidental and continual—drought, the genocide of the Ndebele people in Matabeleland, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic—my mind knew that tragedy and violence weren’t mine alone, but my body hadn’t stopped knowing panic. I had run out of whatever chemical it is that resets to calm. But Charlie seemed to have none of my brokenness. Whole and undamaged to the naked eye, Charlie’s default was calm. Slightly concerned it might be a borrowed calm, I asked him if he was religious at all.

  “Not really,” Charlie told me. His God, he said, was in mountains and rivers. His church was big sky and deep water. His religion was the wilderness. He said he’d lost his heart to it long ago while summering on his grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming. Instead of the Bible, he read whitewater and lines of rock. Instead of church, he summited peaks and fished pristine braids of unpeopled water. Instead of bowing down before any god, he submitted to the superior power of a class five rapid. It was worship, but it was rational worship. It did not involve the humility required to sink to one’s knees in the presence of God and a congregation; there was no snake handling and babbling in tongues; there was no lamentation and rending of garments.

  I too had lost my heart to the wilderness long ago, but it was the dangerously lost heart of a lover, not of a believer. We southern Africans had not thought to look for God in the wilderness because that was where we went to fight one another and to forget our separation from Him. It was also where the adrift and lawless among us journeyed after the war, staying beyond the reach of society until true hell could open up. Of the men I knew who had done this, ex-soldiers mostly, they seemed haplessly tugged back to the theater of their killings. “They’ve gone bush,” we said, by which we meant they were no longer governed by the rules of society and had gone into a place of living suicide. “It can happen to anyone,” Dad said, by which I knew he was really saying it might have happened to him.

  No one wants to go truly mad. But the line from spectacularly eccentric to irreparably mind-lost is invisible, and easily crossed by accident. And when this happened, when someone tripped that wire and blew their mind beyond the reach of even our tolerance, we were in horrified awe. “Lost the plot,” we said. “Benzi.” “Penga.” We cleared space for such people, as if wary of detonating their disorder, as if their madness was something we could trace back with cables, wires, and clips to a device hidden in a cake tin. We knew of men, fatally scorched by war-terror, who played Russian roulette in the bar at the Monomotapa Hotel in Harare; who attempted flight from the balcony of third-story buildings; who swam with crocodiles. “Crazy for real,” we said.

  It is a kind of madness to live in a place to which one does not subscribe to the prevailing natural religions and beliefs. I knew that some of the Shona liberation fighters, deranged after years of conflict and fighting, had expunged their demons in mhondoro ceremonies, calling on the lion spirit of ancient dynasties to remove from them the ngozis, the avenging spirits of those whom they had violated. Left intact, such ngozis precipitate madness, sudden death, awful luck. Spirit-possessed men ran from their horror and ran out of choices. They ended up stranded, wretchedly buried under yesterday, entering a kind of animal state from which the only return was a ritualized reunion of body and soul. Those who have an understanding of the mhondoro ceremony told me that all beings in a community are connected, that the madness of one is the madness of everyone, that there is no separation of minds and bodies between people. Healing of the afflicted and stricken and unhinged is imperative because rain cannot fall on a broken people; drought and an unstable economy will ensue. There’ll be accidents and incidents and epidemics.

  In his enviable Western guileless innocence, though, Charlie had made the world’s wild a place of sanctuary and recreation, a reliable way to make a living. He could step into and out of it anytime he chose as if it were a church, because he had arranged for a Land Rover to meet him at the end of his adventures. He had a Plan B, a passport to elsewhere, a get-out clause. At least by our measure, he was unscathed by the wars of his own people—experienced only through television images, drills under his school desk, and the slightly burned-out druggy rebellion of people half a decade his senior. Charlie didn’t burn through the present, or drown it out, or wash up against it, because his past had left him intact. He had a future to look forward to.

  We left Lusaka the next morning just after dawn, and were launching our canoes below the Kariba Dam a few hours later. Looking up at the dam, I envisioned the massive crush of water above us, the fourth largest river in Africa contained behind the four-hundred-foot concrete wall. Given everything, it seemed unequal to the task. Nothing lasts forever, and yet here was this great gray curve of wall stanching the river between Zimbabwe and Zambia as if those two countries would always have stable governments, as if there would always be enough money in the national coffers to maintain
a project of this magnitude, as if the climate would always be predictable and stable.

  Who, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the dam was being built, could have envisioned weather unbound from nature? Who could have envisioned an independent country instead of Rhodesia? Who could have envisioned a murderous despot like Zimbabwe’s infamous leader, Robert Mugabe, being in charge of half its upkeep? Well, actually, anyone paying attention could have seen a war, and him, coming. In April 1961, Mugabe was already publicly discussing guerrilla action to fight for the freedom of his people, going so far as to rashly declare to a Rhodesian policeman, “We are taking over this country and we will not put up with this nonsense.” Whatever else Mugabe had done in the intervening years, I was fairly certain shoring up the dam to the largest man-made lake in the world wasn’t one of his priorities.

  But Charlie had chosen to launch here because even if he maintained a river runner’s hatred of dams, it was close to the tarmac road and he was persuaded by an American’s love of convenience. “It’s easy to get the canoe down to the river from here,” he explained, easily swinging the craft off the trailer and into the water. Then he steadied it while I lurched for the front seat. “You’ll be okay,” he said. But I knew this is where the local Tonga villagers say the Zambezi River god, Nyaminyami, has been separated from his mate by the dam and that he will one day break it down to get to her. “If we capsize, or you fall out, just remember, float downstream feet first,” Charlie said. “Get to shore if you can. And wait for me.”

  I didn’t say there would be no point because the villagers also said anyone falling into the river at this place, near the rock where the river god was purported to live, would be sucked down immediately, never to be seen again. Evidence suggested this couldn’t be dismissed as mere folksy superstition: between October 1956 and February 1961, sixty-five southern Africans and twenty-one Italians died right here, building the dam. The Frenchman who designed it, André Coyne, said of his own profession, “De tous les ouvrages construits par la main humaine, les barrages sont les plus meurtriers.”1